Laure and Bataille as educators: On the useless value of sacred experiences

Abstract

Whereas there are potentially many ways to have sacred experiences as part of one’s higher education, we show how exam writing as a specific study activity can serve as an occasion for such experiences to occur. Experiences through writing that involve the destruction and creation of worlds, of losing and regaining oneself and of learning profound things along the way. Illustrated through the case of Sofie, an undergraduate philosophy student, we show how experiencing the sacred involves the temporary entrapment of the self by the self, in a demonic fashion. The process of emergence and dissolution of this entrapment ultimately makes up a sacred experience that nourishes a learning-development process that can best be described as an oscillating process of becoming. Our article draws its main philosophical inspiration from Laure and Georges Bataille.